Rimini Protokoll: Remote Copenhagen (2018)Collective audio walk on the E line to Copenhagen Central Station

The artificial tone of a GPS voice tells you to get on the E train. The doors close with a familiar beep, and then you and the other passengers depart from the platform at Sjælør Station. The GPS voice in your headphones was invented and programmed by the German multimedia collective Rimini Protokoll, who are known for developing participatory projects that prompt discussion. The artist collective experiments with new technologies in theatre, film and installations, as well as sound and radio.

For TRANSIT, Rimini Protokoll developed a new, collective audio walk for people to experience on the E line to Copenhagen Central Station. At the beginning of the trip, participants are given a set of headphones, then guided by a recorded GPS voice and a performer who accompanies the group along the entire route. Through a myriad of interwoven transit stories, the audio walk zooms in on the histories of the urban landscape being traversed: its architecture, traffic networks, and social contact and conflict zones. The stories are supplemented and linked by visually evocative sounds recorded along the route, and by atmospheric compositions specifically inspired by places passed by the train.The founders of Rimini Protokoll – Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel – were born in Germany and Switzerland. They live and work in Berlin, Germany.

Venue & dates: The audio walk starts at Vestre Kirkegård at 5pm. The walk will be held on August 31st and September 1st during CHART. Then, it will be held from Monday to Friday from September 14th to October 4th in collaboration with the Metropolis Festival of Art and Performance in Public Space.

SUPERFLEX: Western Rampart (2018)Film, Køge Station Bridge The work will be on display from 13 September to 13 November 2018 from sunset to sunrise

The artist collective SUPERFLEX has produced a brand-new film for the TRANSIT. Addressing the largest border construction in Danish history, Western Rampart is based on the Western Rampart of Copenhagen as a historical construct. The rampart was part of Copenhagen’s inland fortifications, designed to protect the capital of Denmark against invading forces. It was built west of Copenhagen in 1888-92, stretching all the way from Køge Bay in the south to Utterslev Marsh in the north. With its wide-ranging topography, the rampart crosses several present-day borders between the city councils in the region west of Copenhagen, including Copenhagen itself, Brøndby, Rødovre and Hvidovre. The work is exhibited at Køge Station, the terminal of the E line that cuts through this exact area.

As SUPERFLEX show in the film, the Western Rampart is not only of interest from a historical perspective. It is also linked to a series of contemporary issues, such as the ongoing attempts to define, delineate and maintain borders. Western Rampart’s focus on the negotiation of borders or boundaries is also present in the work itself with its intersection of fact and fiction and its mix of documentary footage with more visually experimental and associative sequences. SUPERFLEX have used drones to produce the film, exploring – like several other works in the exhibition – mobile methods, i.e. methods used to investigate phenomena in flux that are themselves on the move.The members of SUPERFLEX – Jakob Fenger (b. 1968), Bjørnstjerne Christiansen (b. 1969) and Rasmus Nielsen (b. 1969) ­– were born in Roskilde, Copenhagen and Jelling, Denmark, respectively. They live and work in Copenhagen.

Halil Altindere: Köfte Airlines (2016) Poster, Copenhagen Central Station, the platform between tracks 10 and 11. On throughout the exhibition run

At Copenhagen Central Station, you will find a poster of a plane on one of the stands between tracks 10 and 11 where the E line departs. At first glance it looks like an airline advertisement, not least due to its streamlined style and its location amidst other advertisements on the platform. But closer examination reveals that the poster shows a plane marked ‘Köfte Airlines’ placed in a surreal manner in a deserted field – a no man’s land devoid of airport infrastructure. We also become aware that the roof and wings of the plane are crowded with refugees, looking ahead in anticipation. In other words, Köfte Airlines is a critical statement on the different – and often extremely unequal – conditions that apply to people in transit today.

As in other projects by Halil Altindere, the surrealism of Köfte Airlines is based on factual reality. The project’s title and motif, for example, come from the northwest region of Turkey, where a motorway diner called Uçak Restaurant serves Turkish meatballs (köfte) and has a view of an abandoned plane bearing the name Köfte Airlines. Altindere’s poster also addresses current political issues: Köfte Airlines has visual associations to media coverage and documentary representation of mass migration. The work was created in collaboration with a group of refugees currently based in the port city of Canakkale. On the poster they pose on the roof and wings of the plane, offering a poignant critique of the perilous conditions under which many refugees are forced to travel. Halil Altindere was born in Mardin, Turkey, in 1971. He lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.

Madame Nielsen: A Parallel world based on the bildungsroman The Invasion – A Stranger in the Flow of Refugees, which is in turn based on a travel on foot among refugees along the Balkan route in October-November 2015 (2018)

‘Madame decides to take a classical European Grand Tour, travelling from historical Hellas, the cradle of democracy, crossing all borders in Europe up to Denmark, “coincidentally” following the roads and paths followed by a wave of refugees right now – and now and now’.

These words come from A Parallel World Based on Madame Nielsen’s Novel The Invasion – A Foreigner in a Sea of Refugees from 2016, an installation project developed for TRANSIT in collaboration with the artist consisting of a map of Europe with the route marked, as well as a series of listening posts and photo collages that reflect critically – often with piercing humour – on Madame Nielsen’s experiences of transit.

A Parallel world based on the novel The Invasioncharts how the passage of a tourist from one place of transit to another is both similar to and radically different from that of a refugee. Madame Nielsen can, for example, waltz across borders with her ‘wine-red EU passport’, as she witnesses refugees experiencing violence, humiliation and demands for money to cross the same borders illegally. The installation describes both traditional places of transit, such as stations, bus terminals and taxi ranks, as well as more improvised sites such as temporary pick-up points at refugee camps and the constantly changing stops of human traffickers on the route up through Europe. The installation thus portrays how traditional and temporary places of transit exist side-by-side and impact on each other, such as when refugees are suddenly no longer seen at European train stations because they are being taken along other, less visible transit routes.

As well as the installation at KØS, Madame Nielsen was leading a walk along the stations of the E line created specifically for TRANSIT. The walk took place in October. Read documentation of the walk here. Madame Nielsen was born on planet Earth. She lives and works in the same place.

Pejk Malinovski: This Room (2018)Virtual-reality work. Can be experienced at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces throughout the exhibition run. Was shown at Copenhagen Central Station November 12th–25th 2018

In the summer of 2015, Europe experienced the arrival of record numbers of refugees and migrants, including people from war-torn Syria. Images of people fleeing through Europe filled the media. But where did they go, all these refugees walking along motorways, arriving by train, bus and truck, setting up a provisional camp at Copenhagen Central Station under the glare of media attention?In answer to this question, poet and sound artist Pejk Malinovski created a new virtual-reality work specifically for TRANSIT. This Room is about the subsequent fates of refugees in refugee camps all over Denmark. Camps located in former prisons, hospitals, schools, camping grounds and temporary structures built to house refugees in remote, isolated areas far from the media spotlight.

Malinovski grew close to a refugee camp up in the 1980s. He remembers playing with Turkish, Iranian and Palestinian childhood friends from the camp, well aware that they might not be there the next day if they had been transferred elsewhere. Malinovski describes the situations he remembers as a kind of involuntary state of transit and limbo: ‘One of my strongest memories from this camp were the small rooms where 8-10 people would sleep on bunk beds, all their belongings stuffed in big suitcases. The room itself was a kind of suitcase, stuck between destinations’.

This Room is a virtual-reality installation where two participants at a time can sit on a bench in a narrow room, wearing a VR headset. Using the highly immediate sensory visual universe of virtual reality technology, the participants are led into a fictional space and given a very real, physical sense of the psychological stress, fear and uncertainty that dominate the transit experience of many refugees. The room is based on refugees’ memories of the real-life transit zones and rooms they have occupied while waiting to hear the verdict on their asylum application. This Room can thus be described as a memory-based mapping of the rooms refugees have passed through and stayed in for longer or shorter periods of time since they left Copenhagen Central Station and practically disappeared from the media spotlight.Pejk Malinovski was born in Denmark in 1976. He lives and works in New York, USA.

Runo Lagomarsino: Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home(2018) Performance, the E line from Copenhagen Central Station to Køge and KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces. The performance is held at 3pm every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday throughout the exhibition run.

Runo Lagomarsino’s project was created specifically for TRANSIT. The art project addresses and plays out in states of mobility, taking the form of a performance on the E line between Copenhagen Central Station and Køge Station. Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home focuses on the area west of Copenhagen that the E line runs through and where many people with migrant backgrounds live. At Copenhagen Central Station a performer gets on the E line, carrying a newspaper in a cloth carrier bag printed with the title of the work in English on one side. The title is a quote from the English writer and art critic John Berger: Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home. On the other side of the bag the title is printed in Turkish, Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, Urdu and Polish, the languages that – besides Danish – are the statistically most prevalent in the area west of Copenhagen.

Every day the performer getting on the train is a different person from the area who speaks one of the selected languages. The performer sits down and starts reading a newspaper published in one of the five languages, either Hürriyet, Asharq al-Awsat, Vesti, Daily Jang or Gazeta Wyborcza. When the train arrives at Køge Station, the performer gets out, walks to KØS, and stands in front of a microphone place inside the exhibition to read an article of their choice aloud. Having done so, the performer hangs the newspaper on the wall. The number of newspapers will increase during the exhibition run until they fill the entire gallery.

Runo Lagomarsino’s art project brings a particular kind of newspapers into the public transit zone of the train; newspapers that are written in the languages most commonly spoken by people living in the area west of Copenhagen, but which are not usually on sale at the kiosks at E line stations. The work thereby emphasises migration as a condition affecting contemporary society in general and this area in particular. Home is, in other words, not a clear-cut category, and the fact that many people today have multiple places they call home leaves its mark on contemporary public spaces – not least on those places where we are on the move. Runo Lagomarsino was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1977. He lives and works in Malmö, Sweden and São Paulo, Brazil.

While the members of the exhibition venue Udstillingsstedet Sydhavn Station (USS) exhibit their banner project Transition on the Line E, Austrian artist Oliver Ressler (b. 1970) takes over Sydhavn Station with his solo show Shifting the Centre of Things. Here audiences can explore the film There are no Syrian refugees in Turkey, the billboard work Stranded and the poster work Too Big to Fail. In their own way, these works elucidate and offer new perspectives on the social and societal consequences of the Western focus on economic growth. The film There are no Syrian refugees in Turkey from 2016 introduces the audience to five Syrian refugees who have actively decided not to travel onwards to EU countries in order to apply for asylum there. Instead, they have chosen to create a life for themselves in Istanbul. Adopting a documentary approach, the film unfolds a political analysis of Turkish and European migration politics from the viewpoint and experiences of its five Syrian protagonists. The Syrian’s decision to remain in Istanbul, and herby opting out of a future in Europe, break away from the Western delusion that Europe is one of the absolute centres of the world – a place which refugees and migrants by definition are expected to have as their dream destination. This shift of focus is also reflected in the exhibition title, Shifting the Centre of Things. KØS shows the work in its original Arabic version with English subtitles.

The large-scale billboard Stranded is placed by the station entrance. At first glance, the image looks like any other of the all-too-familiar media images of drowned refugees washed up on the shores of Europe. However, a closer inspection reveals that the men lying motionless on an empty beach in Stranded wear business suits – the kind of clothes we associate with politicians and managers. Placed partly in the water and partly on the beach, their bodies appear quite literally to be stranded. The poster can thus be regarded as a critical study as to whether we, the viewers, would respond differently to media’s images of disasters if those who perished were travellers of a different privileged kind. At the same time, the poster shifts the focus away from the so-called ‘refugee dilemma’ towards the question of who are the real agents of the economic and political model that causes Europe’s challenges with migration.

In the poster frieze Too Big to Fail, the four words ‘too big to fail’ are installed on a several-meter-long wall in the station. According to the artist, the phrase ‘too big to fail’ refers to how politicians, when faced with the threat of financial crises, claims that the public money should be used to save the banks from bankruptcy. The text’s letters in the posters consist of a photograph showing people at a demonstration organised on March 28, 2009, in numerous cities around the world. The protestors marched under the common slogan ‘We will not pay for your crisis!'. The demonstrations opposed the massive redistribution of public resources undertaken by national authorities. The work puts a focus on the fact that whereas times of economic austerity have rescue plans for banks, they have none for people in financial trouble. During the exhibition, USS will be manned by KØS staff, who will be happy to discuss the art and its themes with you.

Photos: Oliver Ressler, There are no Syrian refugees in Turkey, film, 30 min, 2016, courtesy the artist and The Gallery Apart, Rome

Udstillingsstedet Sydhavn Station (USS)Transition (2018)Location and date will be announced here

In connection with the exhibition project TRANSIT, the artist-run exhibition space Udstillingsstedet Sydhavn Station (USS) will relocate from their premises at Sydhavn Station to a new location on Line E of the S-train service. During that same period, KØS and the TRANSIT-project will take over the USS’ exhibition space, which is located on Line E of the S-train service on the outskirts of the Copenhagen SV district. Here, KØS presents a solo show featuring Austrian artist Oliver Ressler.

The twelve artists associated with USS operate the venue as a co-operative venture. Every month, another artist takes over the exhibition space at the station, enabling them to display contemporary art in a place of public transit where art would not usually be exhibited. They have now applied this approach to their exhibition project Transition, produced especially for TRANSIT. Transition consists of twelve individual banners on the station bridge in Køge. On each banner, one of the twelve members offers their take on the themes of TRANSIT. The works touch upon how the act of being in transit can be associated with a physical or inner state, a transition from one place to another, a fleeting encounter, or with something crossing your path.The twelve works all share the same basic format: a structure consisting of a concrete roadblock and a banner. Such structures often appear in public spaces as temporary measures that are removed again when the changes or incidents they inform us of or direct us past have passed. By utilising this aesthetic, Transition makes us more keenly aware of the formats and transformations of urban spaces. The exhibition venue USS (Udstillingsstedet Sydhavn Station) was launched in 2012 by ten artists. Today it comprises twelve members: Malou da Cunha Bang, Louise Bonde-Hansen, Sonja Lillebæk Christensen, Anders Christian Eriksen, Julie Falk, Nour Fog, Mads Juel, Anne Skole Overgaard, Camilla Rasborg, Veronica Rigét, Emilia Rosenkrantz and Helene Vestergaard. Several members are graduates from academies in Europe and Denmark, and all currently live and work in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen: Promised Land (2011) Video at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces

The camera pans slowly across a port terminal in the dead of night as trucks approach via winding intersections, then pull into the lanes of the terminal. At the same time, we watch two security guards with a baying sniffer dog approach a row of parked trucks in the area. The camera angle shifts, and we cut to a group of young men fleeing the port terminal.Promised Land portrays the final phase of a group of young men’s flight from the war-torn regimes of Iran and Afghanistan to their life as refugees in England. More specifically, the video installation focuses on the time they spend in the French harbour city of Calais, which, being a border crossing point, is one of the most heavily trafficked and controversial transit zones in Western Europe. Here we meet Reza and his three-year-old son, who live in the ruins of an old building, waiting and hoping for a chance to get to England. Mohammed, Jafar and Hasan are also in limbo in Calais. They are determined to cross the Channel to England, just 35 km away. After repeated hazardous attempts to cross the border, they devise an alternative escape plan: swimming across the harbour and crawling unseen aboard a ferry.

Promised Land follows these escape attempts, showing us the dreams refugees have for the future through the ways they try to escape and the survival tactics they have to learn in critical transit situations. The documentary video installation shifts between the razor-sharp, carefully composed, wide format of cinematography, and the refugees’ own – often grainy, handheld – footage recorded during their perilous journey across the Channel. As a result, the video both addresses and is created by the very different experiences of being in transit for a professional film crew and for young men fleeing for their lives. Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen was born in 1971 in Aalborg, Denmark. He lives and works in Paris, France.

Marco Poloni: Displacement Island (2006)Installation at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces

Displacement Island focuses on the many different people – tourists, migrants, refugees, fishermen and border police – whose routes cross daily on and around the Italian island of Lampedusa. Located near Sicily, the island is both a popular holiday destination and a key transit zone for refugees and migrants en route to Europe.Holiday resorts often function as zones of contact and conflict for different kinds of travellers. On Lampedusa, such clashes are extreme, because until recently the island’s CIE (Centre for Identification and Expulsion) was located at the end of the only runway at the local airport. This meant that migrants detained at CIE prior to being deported could look through a barbed-wire fence directly at arriving tourists. For the TRANSIT exhibition, Poloni has created a spatial installation with constellations of photographs spreading across the walls. The photographs do not form any logical, coherent narrative, rather, they form montages creating the potential for new, associative connections through ruptures and shifts.

Poloni uses a wide spectrum of visual material: tourist snapshots, aerial photographs, surveillance images and stills from famous films. The complex imagery bears testimony to the very different conditions for movements applying to the various people on the island. Some are there as tourists, happily posing for private holiday shots. Others, like the military authorities, border police and the staff at CIE, use aerial photography and surveillance images to prevent the free movement of refugees and migrants. Displacement Island also demonstrates how many people have only ever seen transit zones like Lampedusa in the fictional world of film. Last but not least, Poloni’s project shows that not everyone is photographed voluntarily. Due to the precariousness of their position, many refugees and migrants try to keep out of sight of the authorities, tourists and locals alike. They are only visible here via the traces they leave behind: life jackets, the sand-covered remains of clothing on the beach, left-behind cigarette packets and the small, confiscated fishing boats in which they arrived. Marco Paloni was born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1962. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Paris, France.

Sonja Lillebæk Christensen works with a personal approach to specific places, routes or geographical areas, as well as to various issues she encounters in different contexts. From her concrete observations and inquiring, long-term investigations, small stories emerge. These stories often take the form of video works in which music, voice-overs and sequences of images connect the private and public, confronting the viewer with topical, critical and humorous images and statements.

Budbringer fra oplandet is a current example of Lillebæk Christensen’s art practice. The video combines green-screen studio recordings, animation and video sequences filmed by the artist herself during car trips and train journeys on the Copenhagen E line, presenting a distinctive, mobile perspective on the area west of Copenhagen. The region is experienced from a bird’s-eye perspective, with a white crow as narrator and the ‘herald of the hinterland’. In her inner monologue, the narrator deliberates on the difference between belonging and not belonging, between inclusion and exclusion, and between understanding and not understanding a society of which you do not feel part.

Budbringer fra oplandet is not only site-specific to the region west of Copenhagen. The video also takes geographical detours to Western Jutland where the artist was born and raised, and incorporates subjects and issues that only closer examination – and the creation of associative connections – reveal to be related to the area west of Copenhagen. The work brings Sonja Lillebæk Christensen’s measured, careful and personal artistic method into focus while also striving to avoid reducing sites such as stations on the E line to actual, physical and locally bound places of transit. Instead, Budbringer fra oplandet creates a space for the viewer to experience the stations as the multifaceted, socially complex and interconnected places they essentially are.Sonja Lillebæk was born in 1972 at Grenå Hospital. She has lived at 23 different addresses since then (most of them in mid- and western Jutland), the latest and current being in southwest Copenhagen.

The video Liquid Traces – The Left-To-Die Boat Case is a collaborative work by architect Lorenzo Pezzani and filmmaker Charles Heller, reconstructing events during the left-to-die boat case when seventy-two passengers left the coast of Libya bound for the Italian island of Lampedusa on March 27th 2011. The passengers were on board a small rubber boat which drifted in NATO-controlled waters for fourteen days. Despite the issue of repeated SOS calls specifying the location of the boat in distress and repeated contact with military authorities in the area, nobody came to their rescue. Only nine of the boat’s passengers survived.

Contrary to the myth that the sea erases all traces, Pezzani and Heller’s video project shows that like any other crime scene, the sea harbours evidence. The sea is, in other words, a witness that can be made to speak. Pezzani and Heller, both members of the collective research project Forensic Oceanography, have compiled a human rights report in connection with their activist Liquid Traces – The Left-To-Die Boat Case project. This report has been used as evidence in multiple lawsuits against the states involved in the military operations depicted in the video. Pezzani and Heller also contribute an in-depth article on the Liquid Traces – The Left-To-Die Boat Case projectin the research publication accompanying the exhibition.Forensic Oceanography is part of Forensic Architecture – a group of architects, filmmakers, designers and researchers from Goldsmiths, University of London who experiment with architectural and artistic methods as tools for investigating the conflicts of mobility and migration politics, as well as the violation of human rights in the Mediterranean.

Halil Altindere: Homeland (2016)Video at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces

On a beach, a group of female tourists do yoga on a bathing jetty with a view of the azure Aegean Sea. But the tranquillity of the situation is suddenly disturbed when a group of refugees rush towards the jetty, pull themselves on board an inflatable, orange lifeboat, and head for the open sea. At first glance it seems surreal. But this is a portrayal of a real-life situation, which – especially in the summer of 2015 – took place at various points along the coast of Turkey, where thousands of refugees attempted to cross the ocean from the very same beaches where millions of tourists were on holiday.The first scene of Halil Altindere’s Homeland zooms in on the intersecting, yet radically disparate journeys of tourists and refugees. The video then follows the perilous journey of a group of refugees to Germany. En route, they pass a range of transit sites, checkpoints and border crossings under drone surveillance. In the final scene they end up in Berlin’s old Tempelhof Airport, which has served as a makeshift refugee camp since 2015.

Homeland blends fact with fiction, cutting between documentary footage and staged scenes. The collaboration with the Syrian activist and rapper Mohammed Abu Hajar is characteristic of Halil Altindere’s collective and collaborative art projects addressing contemporary political issues. On the soundtrack Mohammed Abu Hajar raps about life as a refugee: being stranded in transit and feeling alien, vulnerable and frequently misunderstood in a new country. As a refugee himself, he has taken the route shown in the video as part of his escape from Syria to Germany, where he lives today. Halil Altindere was born in 1971 in Mardin. He lives and works in Istanbul.

Madame Nielsen: A Parallel world based on the bildungsroman The Invasion – A Stranger in the Flow of Refugees, which is in turn based on a travel on foot among refugees along the Balkan route in October-November 2015 (2018)Installation at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces and a walk along the stations of the E line

Madame decides to take a classical European Grand Tour, travelling from historical Hellas, the cradle of democracy, crossing all borders in Europe up to Denmark, “coincidentally” following the roads and paths followed by a wave of refugees right now – and now and now’.

These words come from A Parallel World Based on Madame Nielsen’s Novel The Invasion – A Foreigner in a Sea of Refugees from 2016, an installation project developed for TRANSIT in collaboration with the artist consisting of a map of Europe with the route marked, as well as a series of listening posts and photo collages that reflect critically – often with piercing humour – on Madame Nielsen’s experiences of transit. A Parallel world based on the novel The Invasioncharts how the passage of a tourist from one place of transit to another is both similar to and radically different from that of a refugee. Madame Nielsen can, for example, waltz across borders with her ‘wine-red EU passport’, as she witnesses refugees experiencing violence, humiliation and demands for money to cross the same borders illegally. The installation describes both traditional places of transit, such as stations, bus terminals and taxi ranks, as well as more improvised sites such as temporary pick-up points at refugee camps and the constantly changing stops of human traffickers on the route up through Europe. The installation thus portrays how traditional and temporary places of transit exist side-by-side and impact on each other, such as when refugees are suddenly no longer seen at European train stations because they are being taken along other, less visible transit routes.

As well as the installation at KØS, Madame Nielsen was leading a walk along the stations of the E line created specifically for TRANSIT. The walk took place in October. Read documentation of the walk here. Madame Nielsen was born on planet Earth. She lives and works in the same place.

The sound of humming motors fills the air and an empty set of aircraft stairs fills the frame. With no contact between them, a group of people start to slowly and silently move up the steps. In a sequence shot from the top of the stairs we see close-ups of their facial features, bodies and movements. The majority are men, most of them apparently of African or Latin American descent. Their basic and in many cases worn clothing and down-at-heel shoes tell us these travellers are of limited means. Once the steps are packed with people, they stand waiting in silence. The camera then zooms out, and from different camera angle we realise that the steps do not lead to the entrance of an airplane as expected, but stands detached and isolated in the middle of the runway. This is where the people stand. Waiting, with no prospect of departure, as one airplane after another rolls across the tarmac and takes off in the background.

Paci’s work focuses on the radically different conditions under which people travel in our contemporary globalised society. More specifically, the work takes a critical view of airports as public transit areas where far from everyone moves on equal terms. On the contrary, airports are sites of unequal power relationships between different categories of travellers. Whilst privileged travellers check in, go through security, then walk freely up the stairs to departing planes, other travellers like migrants and refugees are left in limbo without the same freedom of movement. They are caught in what the artist calls ‘Lives in Transit’.Adrian Paci was born in Shkodër, Albania, in 1969. He lives and works in Milan, Italy.

Pejk Malinovski: This Room (2018)Virtual-reality work. Can be experienced at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces throughout the exhibition run. Was shown at Copenhagen Central Station November 12th–25th 2018

In the summer of 2015, Europe experienced the arrival of record numbers of refugees and migrants, including people from war-torn Syria. Images of people fleeing through Europe filled the media. But where did they go, all these refugees walking along motorways, arriving by train, bus and truck, setting up a provisional camp at Copenhagen Central Station under the glare of media attention?In answer to this question, poet and sound artist Pejk Malinovski created a new virtual-reality work specifically for TRANSIT. This Room is about the subsequent fates of refugees in refugee camps all over Denmark. Camps located in former prisons, hospitals, schools, camping grounds and temporary structures built to house refugees in remote, isolated areas far from the media spotlight.

Malinovski grew close to a refugee camp up in the 1980s. He remembers playing with Turkish, Iranian and Palestinian childhood friends from the camp, well aware that they might not be there the next day if they had been transferred elsewhere. Malinovski describes the situations he remembers as a kind of involuntary state of transit and limbo: ‘One of my strongest memories from this camp were the small rooms where 8-10 people would sleep on bunk beds, all their belongings stuffed in big suitcases. The room itself was a kind of suitcase, stuck between destinations’.

This Room is a virtual-reality installation where two participants at a time can sit on a bench in a narrow room, wearing a VR headset. Using the highly immediate sensory visual universe of virtual reality technology, the participants are led into a fictional space and given a very real, physical sense of the psychological stress, fear and uncertainty that dominate the transit experience of many refugees. The room is based on refugees’ memories of the real-life transit zones and rooms they have occupied while waiting to hear the verdict on their asylum application. This Room can thus be described as a memory-based mapping of the rooms refugees have passed through and stayed in for longer or shorter periods of time since they left Copenhagen Central Station and practically disappeared from the media spotlight.Pejk Malinovski was born in Denmark in 1976. He lives and works in New York, USA.

Runo Lagomarsino: Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home(2018) Performance, the E line from Copenhagen Central Station to Køge and KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces. The performance is held at 3pm every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday throughout the exhibition run.

Runo Lagomarsino’s project was created specifically for TRANSIT. The art project addresses and plays out in states of mobility, taking the form of a performance on the E line between Copenhagen Central Station and Køge Station. Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home focuses on the area west of Copenhagen that the E line runs through and where many people with migrant backgrounds live. At Copenhagen Central Station a performer gets on the E line, carrying a newspaper in a cloth carrier bag printed with the title of the work in English on one side. The title is a quote from the English writer and art critic John Berger: Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home. On the other side of the bag the title is printed in Turkish, Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, Urdu and Polish, the languages that – besides Danish – are the statistically most prevalent in the area west of Copenhagen.

Every day the performer getting on the train is a different person from the area who speaks one of the selected languages. The performer sits down and starts reading a newspaper published in one of the five languages, either Hürriyet, Asharq al-Awsat, Vesti, Daily Jang or Gazeta Wyborcza. When the train arrives at Køge Station, the performer gets out, walks to KØS, and stands in front of a microphone place inside the exhibition to read an article of their choice aloud. Having done so, the performer hangs the newspaper on the wall. The number of newspapers will increase during the exhibition run until they fill the entire gallery.

Runo Lagomarsino’s art project brings a particular kind of newspapers into the public transit zone of the train; newspapers that are written in the languages most commonly spoken by people living in the area west of Copenhagen, but which are not usually on sale at the kiosks at E line stations. The work thereby emphasises migration as a condition affecting contemporary society in general and this area in particular. Home is, in other words, not a clear-cut category, and the fact that many people today have multiple places they call home leaves its mark on contemporary public spaces – not least on those places where we are on the move. Runo Lagomarsino was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1977. He lives and works in Malmö, Sweden and São Paulo, Brazil.

TRAVELOG is an art project created in close collaboration between artists Tina Enghoff and Kent Klich, the KØS education and students from Køge Gymnasium and VUC Vestegnen in Rødovre. The project takes its starting point in a meeting arranged between the students and two refugees, Brhane Tesfaalem from Eritrea and Ahmad Shukri Alali from Syria, who shared their personal stories about fleeing one’s country and arriving in Denmark as young refugees. This meeting was one among several customised workshops in which the students, working in collaboration with the artists, examined the subject of ‘transit’ and gathered information about current conditions along the borders. Taking the two refugees’ stories as their starting point, the students used their mobile phones to capture spaces, states and stories of transit in public spaces in the vicinity of their respective schools. The students also marked out various routes taken by refugees on maps and worked with words associated with the concept of being in transit – as a refugee and as a student in Denmark. The students also worked with the deluge of refugee videos available online by selecting scenes that made a special impression. This selection process was part of the overall collection of information that forms the basis of TRAVELOG.

Tina Enghoff and Kent Klich both work with photography as their medium and address themes associated with migration politics in their artistic practices.

Photos:Students doing research Photographs by studentsStudents in the making of TRAVELOG